Coverage of the ICC Women's World Cup is good by comparison, it's live and although it's not free-to-air, all North Sydney oval games are on Foxtel. Tick for television. Tick too, for ABC radio which has had live commentary of all Australian games. The print press though, they've hardly paid any attention to the tourament. Perhaps it's because Australia has struggled and will likely not now make the final? The online presence, beyond the excellent tournament homepage, is also limited. NZ Cricket's tournament site is good with interviews, match reports and the like as is the cricinfo mini-site.

Women's sport suffers badly from a lack of media attention which translates into poor attendance, in most codes, and probably affects participation(?). In Australia, swimming has been the exception although the new trans-Tasman netball competition is also live and free-to-air (plus, it seems, subscriber access to high definition). In New Zealand, my memory is that only netball gets consistent coverage.

29 comments:

Nice blog. In the UK the position is similar, and England have a great chance of reaching the final and even winning. At Cricketwithballs we are trying to keep in touch with it and have someone sending us reports from what games he can attend; come by and see us sometime. Jrod also wrote about it on the Wisden Cricketer blog:

Thank you v much for the linky love and for writing about this. It was the second item on the sports news on One tonight, after a piece about the men's cricket test which starts tomorrow. They did announce towards the end of the bulletin that the White Ferns had won, too. They actually had quite a bit of footage, which surprised me. Although they did describe the team as "athletic" or something equally lame. Athletes who are athletic? Who knew!

They're a bloody good team, well led and playing great cricket. I confess I'm terribly one-eyed and would back the NZ darts team, but I do love cricket, the venue's are great, the consideration of families is a real plus.

Years ago, 2000, I listened to the White Ferns win the world cup hosted at Lincoln oval. I'd just left working at Lincoln so I was sorry I'd not been there. It was a blinder of a game, came down to the last over and we won... I'm hoping for the same result on the weekend!

Julie, I don't see what's so odd about describing a cricket team as athletic. To me it simply means that they are enthusiastic fielders. Not everybody is, and you don't have to be athletic to play cricket.

The great Inzamam-ul-Haq for instance used to take power naps on the field.

"We were at a warm-up game in Zimbabwe once and the fast bowlers were on with the old ball. I was standing at slip with Inzi next to me. We crouched down as you do when the bowlers were coming in. Four or five balls later, I noticed Inzi was still crouching and surprised, I asked him if everything was ok. He replied, "I'm fine, just trying to sleep. The ball is old and reversing so there's hardly a chance there will be any edges to snap up."- As told by Aamir Sohail

Inzy once tried to lose weight, but found that his form suffered and thought 'sod this!' and went back to being fat, and regained his greatness.